Essentially, yes: nowadays you can go much further without basic understanding of what’s going on. The ability to fire up magic black boxes that are somewhat functional without any configuration or understanding required is liberating at first, so it’s perfectly understandable. I don’t think it’s a panacea, though.

From previous interactions in this community, it seems all but obvious nowadays, when peoples’ experience with sysadmin in average amounts to running scripts running docker in some form.

Considering Matrix age, and precedents, my bets/hopes are for a new protocol to emerge as a “modern Matrix” (just like Matrix was marketing itself as “modern XMPP”).

Matrix just doesn’t have a great and smooth UX right now to compete with the main actors, the heavy protocol is to blame so that’s not something we can hope to see sorted out quickly/on time.

I mean, if you want Matrix AND that it works, you just install ejabberd or prosody and go on with your life. But then there’s nothing fancy to report or brag about, it just works.

I see Trilium!

XMPP is what Matrix was meant to be, but 15 years too early

In part. The whole idea behind snikket is to bundle together a bunch of pre-existing mainstream and well behaved XMPP clients and server under one consistent and polished package, so that it just works out of the box for the less savvy users and admins who then don’t have to think too much about configuration and peers onboarding. So, yes, on Android, you will find a rebranded version of the Conversations client, prosody on the server, siskin on iOS, and IIRC they are working on a SDK for the desktop.